[BITList] Black Narcissus

[wantok at me.com]

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Godden,  (Margaret) Rumer  (1907-1998), writer, was born on 10 December 1907 at Meads, 30 Milnthorpe Road, Eastbourne, the second of the four daughters of Arthur Leigh Godden (1876-1966), shipping company manager, and his wife, Katherine Norah Hingley (1876-1966). Soon after Godden's birth her mother took her back to Bengal, where Godden's father worked for the Brahmaputra Steam Navigation Company. Rumer Godden (then known as Peggie) grew up at Narayanganj, on the banks of the Megna River near Dacca in what is now Bangladesh. From the age of five she was determined to be a writer, and several of her best books were inspired by India, where the first half of her life was based. Like most families in British India the Goddens lived in some style, in a large house with a magnificent garden and fifteen servants. All her life Rumer recalled with delight the hibiscus, jasmine, and bougainvillea, and the scent of the sweet peas; but she grew up aware of the darker side of Anglo-Indian life.

Although her parents followed the custom of the time by sending their daughters back to England to be educated, they decided to bring Rumer and her sister Jonquil (known as Jon) back to Narayanganj when the First World War began. Godden felt that she was the plain sister (her nose was likened to the duke of Wellington's) but she and Jon were close, and they later collaborated on a book about their upbringing, Two under the Indian Sun (1966). In 1920, however, Rumer reluctantly resumed her interrupted schooling at Moira House in Eastbourne. She disliked her schooldays intensely, but always remained grateful to Mona Swann, the English teacher who taught her grammar and encouraged her to write. However, as she needed to earn her own living she trained first as a dance teacher (later she used a ballet company as the background for several books).

Back in India, Godden read E. M. Forster's A Passage to India soon after its publication in 1924 and, she later wrote, began to feel uneasy about the attitudes and reputation of the conventional Anglo-Indian world she inhabited. Rumer Godden, prickly and indomitable, always went her own way; to the alarm of her circle, in 1930 she opened the Peggie Godden School of Dance in Calcutta, where she unconventionally accepted both Indian and Eurasian pupils. On 9 March 1934 she married Laurence Sinclair Foster (1905-1977), a stockbroker and golf champion, in Calcutta Cathedral because she was pregnant with his child (the boy died at birth). The marriage was soon in difficulties as they had little in common, but they had two more children, Jane and Paula.

Rumer Godden's first book, Chinese Puzzle, celebrating the Pekinese dogs she loved all her life, was published in 1935, but she made her name with Black Narcissus, which appeared in 1939 while she was back in England awaiting the birth of her second child. A psychologically acute novel about a group of nuns struggling to set up a convent in the Himalayan foothills, it became a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic and was later made into a classic film by Michael Powell (much despised by Godden).

After the Second World War broke out, Godden took her children on a hazardous journey by boat to rejoin her husband in Calcutta. When he joined the army in 1941 she was left severely in debt; she retreated with her daughters first to a tea plantation near Darjeeling and then to a house outside Srinagar in Kashmir. She started a herb garden and continued doggedly to write; but in 1944, after a mysterious episode when it appeared that one of the servants had put ground glass in the family's food (which she used in her book Kingfishers Catch Fire, 1953), she fled back to Calcutta, where she occupied herself in writing a report on the war work being done by women in Bengal.

In 1945 Godden returned to Britain, determined to resume her career as a novelist. She was divorced from Laurence Foster in 1948 and on 26 November 1949 married James Leslie Haynes-Dixon (1900-1973), a civil servant then running the central office of information. A week later she found herself back in Calcutta with Jean Renoir, the renowned French film director, helping him make a film based on what is perhaps her best book, The River (1946), which draws heavily upon her own childhood. For the rest of her life she lived in Britain.

Rumer Godden was restless by nature, and the search for the perfect place to live and work led her to move house frequently. Nevertheless, she was a disciplined and productive writer whose books brought her a devoted following. In the early 1960s she converted to Roman Catholicism, and her friendship with the scholarly Benedictine nun Dame Felicitas Corrigan led to one of her most ambitious and admired novels, In this House of Brede (1969). She alternated her adult novels with books for children, and in 1972 she won a Whitbread award for The Diddakoi, a novel for teenagers about Gypsies, televised as Kizzy. After her husband's death in 1973 she moved from Rye in Sussex, where they had been living in the house that once belonged to Henry James, to be near her daughter Jane in Dumfriesshire.

During the 1980s Rumer Godden's fiction went through an unfashionable phase, but she had renewed success with A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep (1987) and A House with Four Rooms (1989), her two volumes of autobiography; in 1993 she was appointed OBE. In 1994, at eighty-six, she spent a month travelling around her old haunts in India for a television documentary, sustained, at her request, by a supply of her favourite whisky. In 1997 her last novel, Cromartie v. the God Shiva, Acting through the Government of India, once again set in India, was published and widely praised. By this time her health was failing, and after a series of strokes she died on 8 November 1998, at Parkgate Nursing Home, Courance, Kirkmichael, Dumfriesshire. Her ashes were buried with her second husband's in Rye after a memorial service on 10 December 1998, which would have been her ninety-first birthday. She produced seventy books, including collections of poetry and anthologies.

Anne Chisholm 

Sources  R. Godden and J. Godden, Two under the Indian sun (1966) + R. Godden, A time to dance, no time to weep (1987) + R. Godden, A house with four rooms (1989) + A. Chisholm, Rumer Godden: a storyteller's life (1998) + private information (2004) [daughter] + b. cert. + m. cert. [James Leslie Haynes-Dixon] + d. cert.
Archives Boston University Library, corresp. and literary papers + priv. coll., papers SOUND BBC Sound Archives
Likenesses  M. Gerson, photograph, 1958, NPG [see illus.] · photographs, priv. coll.



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